One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (43 page)

Yet it was also reported and attested to by every single woman of the holy society who had ever worked at Temima's side in a team of four performing these final ministrations that, without exception, in the last moments, as the veil was drawn down over the face of the corpse lying there in her white shrouds just before being swaddled in her winding sheet, the words Thank You always came out of her mouth packed with sand without spilling a grain, as if emanating from her agitated soul still hovering like a moth rubbing its wings together on her lips before taking flight. They all heard it, they were startled the first times it happened, but then they came to expect it almost as a point of good manners; they recognized that it was meant not for them but for Temima alone, and
they bowed their heads in awe. But Temima's head swung back sharply as if struck each time the words shot out of the mouth of the corpse, it was always a blow. The highest mitzvah for everyone else was not available to her, she was not worthy, she performed this service with an excess of pride disguised as humility. Upon Temima was placed the burden of having to strive to fulfill an even higher mitzvah for which she would get no gratitude.

Her quest also lay in the realm of death, that much was clear—but what? Remembrance? Resurrection? Reclaiming the tree of life that the first woman had forfeited? Slashing her way beyond the cherubim and the fiery revolving sword guarding the entrance to the east of Eden and plucking its fruit? Finally, the woman had figured out which fruit was the forbidden one. Knowledge was tasty, delightful to behold, desirable to attain—a pastime, a plaything, a distraction. But choosing life, swallowing up death forever and wiping away the tears from every face—that was the true prize, that was her messianic mission, her thankless task.

Nevertheless, the women who worked alongside Temima under her direction performing the purification ritual considered it a great honor to be joined in their holy society by a personage of such stature. Moreover, they regarded her participation as an extraordinary privilege accorded to the remains lying naked under a sheet, a distinction the corpse was surely aware of at some level of consciousness and could appreciate.

Temima demanded to take on for herself the most difficult and unsavory tasks—washing the waxen feet encrusted and scaled like hooves and cleaning under the clawlike toenails with a toothpick, thrusting her hands into the orifices to drain out all solid and liquid matter like a plumber, extracting whatever they were stuffed with, false teeth, rotting food, pessaries, excrement, gems, money, drugs, once, a piece of wire coathanger, another time, a vibrator like a dead rat. She chanted psalms and verses from the Song of Songs in praise of the beauty of the remains lying stiffly in front of her as she labored, pausing between refrains before exposing the next section of the body to be worked on in order to beg forgiveness of the dead if in any way she had violated her dignity, addressing her by name—so-and-so daughter not only of a father but also of a mother, she had ruled that the mother's name must also be noted and invoked as well.

So it happened one night that Temima repeatedly intoned throughout the meticulous washing of an exceptionally heavy woman weighing more
than three hundred pounds the words, Forgive me Frima daughter of Zsuzsi and Rudolf if by any of my actions I have in any way trespassed on your honor
.
But it was only when she would not be dissuaded from serving as one of in this case three women who held up this massive body while the fourth poured the nine
kavin
of water over it in a continuous stream for the actual
tahara
ritual, chanting She is pure, She is pure, She is pure, only when she felt the full crushing weight of this body through which this human being had experienced her life and looked out at the world, only then did Temima realize with a pang of despair that the dead woman she was raising was her father's wife, Frumie. She had removed the plaintive polish from the nails, raked between the toes, separated the folds of fat to wipe the crevices in between, extracted the false teeth from the mouth, probed inside the nostrils and ears with a Q-tip, combed out every knot in the wispy hair, cleaned the scar over the gash through which the womb had been scraped out, cleaned the webbing of scar tissue where the breasts had once been, cleaned out the orifice where her father had deposited his seed, repeating the name of the dead woman all the while, pleading for forgiveness for any sins this woman might have committed among them surely gluttony, begging forgiveness for herself if in any fashion she had offended her. But not until she had hoisted the great load of the physical remains for the purification bath itself did Temima recognize that this had been her own stepmother Frumie to whom she had been attending all this while. She had invoked her name again and again and the name of her mother and father, she had looked at her closely, examined the moles and bristles on her skin, the sores and spots and discolorations, the lumps and lesions, her acne-pitted face, but she had not taken her in, she had not truly seen her in death to know who she was as she had not seen her in life.

How much older was Frumie than Temima? Five, six years at most. But the body Temima now gazed down upon ready to be dressed in its shrouds was utterly used up. Frumie's girls, the daughters of her father but not her mother, Temima's half sisters, whom she had always conflated with the five daughters of Zelophekhad of the unmentionable sin demanding their right to exist, might even at this very moment be waiting outside the door of the purification room in the direction toward which their mother's feet were pointed, assuming they had escorted her remains from Brooklyn for burial in Israel, which would have amounted to a grudging
expense for their mutual father, Reb Berel Bavli. No matter, whatever they shared in common, Temima would not have recognized them in any case except perhaps if they were clumped together in a gang of five, and out of delicacy members of the holy society because of the intimate knowledge they acquired of the deceased took pains to avoid contact with survivors especially those who had in some form once been inside this very body.

She wondered if her father might be lurking somewhere nearby too or even if he had come to Israel. Maybe he hired some loafer to accompany the body stowed in the cargo hold of the El Al carrier through all the stages to the interment in some less prestigious and cheaper cemetery in the Jerusalem environs, the compromise Temima imagined worked out by her father in his negotiations with his wife so that she would give up and die already, just as he had hired a bum off the street to recite Kaddish over her own mother. In any event, Temima had not had any contact with her father since he had turned down her appeal for help in obtaining a divorce from Howie.

Soon after that, he had officially cut her off entirely by declaring her dead and sitting shiva over her for committing adultery with a s
chvartze
whom nobody could ever convince him was a Jew even if you stood on your head and spit wooden nickels and talked until you were blue in the face. At least he sat shiva in person, Temima reflected, rather than hiring some good-for-nothing to do the job in exchange for a brisket.

Throughout her father's seven days of mourning over herself, as a point of honor, Temima took great pains to make her living presence felt. At first she called the Boro Park house nonstop on the telephone. One of the girls would always pick up in the way of youth still hopefully expecting their lives to be altered dramatically through a message communicated from the outside world. Temima could hear the girl yelling across the living room to her father sitting on the floor—she could picture it—on the avocado green wall-to-wall carpeting in his stocking feet with the ornate smoky mirror in its gilded frame draped with a sheet behind him, accepting condolences from visitors for her passing. “Tateh, it's Tema,” the kid would yell, “long distance, from hell—she wants to talk to you.” Naturally, her father did not come to the phone since she was dead. He wasn't like some kind of meshuggeneh in the street, he didn't talk to himself, though as he never failed to point out to others he conversed with that at least if he talked to himself he would be talking to an intelligent person, a person with some brains in his head.

Even so, despite the brazenness of Temima's constant calls, the family tolerated them longer than she might have predicted, probably because the girls kicked and screamed and raised a fuss and threw a fit against unplugging their lifeline, until finally, at the end of the third day, they clamped down and took the phone off the hook. Temima considered coming to Brooklyn herself from Israel and sitting down on the floor beside her father in sackcloth and ashes to mourn her own life like Jephta's daughter or like a character always wearing black in a Russian play, and thereby in the presence of family and friends, mourners and comforters, rub in the absurdity of the whole travesty and farce, but that would have been too much of an effort, that would have implied she cared too much. Instead she arranged through the Toiter to have some of his people march full time back and forth in front of the house carrying signs on poles, Tema Bavli Lives, Tema Bavli Is Alive and Well and Living by the Dead Sea, Reb Berel Bavli—Your Daughter Tema Is Not Dead Meat, and so on, now and then breaking out in joyous singing and dancing, giving the lie to the rumors of death. On the sixth day, by personal order of the police commissioner of the city of New York, the Toiter's demonstrators were arrested for disturbing the peace. On the seventh day Temima rested—not in peace but in indifference.

Now, as she worked with the other three women to dress Frumie in her simple white linen shrouds like the high priest in the Temple on Yom Kippur, the Day of Judgment and Awe, it required all of Temima's inner strength to hold back from bursting out in hacking laughter that would have glided inevitably into savage crying. She looked down, focusing on her task, chanting the order of the dressing in a soft trembling voice—And she shall be attired in a linen headdress, and linen breeches shall be on her flesh, and she shall don a holy linen tunic, and with a linen sash she shall be girded, and God Almighty will give her mercy. She did not inform her companions who this woman was to her even though now that she had recognized her she ought to have been spared this further painful invasion of the physical privacy of someone who, after all, was related to her even if only by marriage, she should have been shielded from revealing the nakedness that belonged to her father, an explicit incest prohibition in Leviticus, a variation on the sin of Ham. May I be lost in the depths of the sea, Temima prayed to herself, may I be vaporized in the atmosphere, may I be swallowed up by the earth rather than have this poor body of mine that I have guarded so zealously to dispose of in accordance with
my own desires subjected to handling even by well-meaning souls such as these earnest good women who are toiling at my side at this very moment.

The lifting of Frumie's dead weight to slip on the pants, simply finding a pair of pants that would fit her from among the shrouds, a sash that would go around her waist just once much less three times with a bit left over to tie with a slip knot, never mind such fancy stuff as fashioning it in the shape of the letter
shin
for God Almighty's name Shaddai—viewed from above, with detachment, with no imperative for reverence, the scene was slapstick, black comedy. Temima turned her inner vision to her memory of Frumie pregnant, sitting at the edge of the bed in the Boro Park house where her own mother had once slept and perished, Frumie dressed in her hat and coat with the white fur trimming, her black patent-leather pocketbook in her lap, her suitcase packed ready beside her, all set to escape, crushed by the realization that there was no way to sustain herself on her own, no one who would be left to protect her daughters, no place for her to go—she was trapped. Few and bad had been the years of her life. Now she was released early for good behavior, she had found the only way out. For your salvation I had hoped, O Lord.

Temima was overcome with a desire to give Frumie a parting gift, some token to thank her with for her kindness over the years they had lived together under the same roof, for the generosity of simply leaving Temima alone to find her own way, but that was impermissible. Naked I came from my mother's womb and naked I will return. Shrouds do not come with pockets for little treasures or mementos, in death there is no discrimination between rich and poor, the same uniform for everyone, the same plain pine box put together without nails, in Israel maybe no box at all, affording unimpeded access for the maggots and all the other creatures of decay burrowing in wait. Even between men and women the distinctions fade in death; a devout woman is clad in trousers in death perhaps for the first time in her life just like a man, the restrictions fall away—with the exception, Temima now reminded herself, of the prayer shawl in which only a man is privileged to be cloaked in life, in death his prayer shawl can become his winding sheet.

With a nod to her companions Temima stepped away for a moment from the corpse to retrieve her capacious white talit with its licorice black stripes. It was a traditional prayer shawl, with no extraneous ornamentation and no feminizing accents. She wore it whether praying alone or
with others regardless of the time of month in a woman still cyclic, she did not consider it a show of excessive piety or ostentation as a woman to wrap herself in it but rather an essential cocoon inside of which she could achieve the focus and transcendence that carried her to new mystical planes considered unattainable by her sex. She always carried it with her in a special bag in those days should the opportunity for
hitbodedut
present itself, which she performed during this period in the enhanced isolation of the sheltering white tent of her prayer shawl.